I tested a system equipped with a GeForce 9400M motherboard GPU for about a week and it’s time to share what I think of it. First of all, this review won’t go into all the benchmarking stuff. For that, I’ll give you good pointers at the end of the post. Instead, I would like to focus on what you and I can do with it and why motherboard GPU have become so popular these days. They have come a long way since NVIDIA’s initial nForce product.
So far, I have been impressed with this product and it is not surprising that Apple has chosen this chipset to power their new Macbook computers. The chip can accelerate stuff like physics, video-encode but I’m using it mainly for its Media Center capabilities. It can decode Blu-Ray movies with a CPU utilization of less than 20%* and it’s fanless and therefore, silent.
Fast Blu-Ray Decode
Not so long ago, one needed to have a beefy CPU and a fast GPU to decode a Blu-Ray movie. That led to requiring gaming level hardware to build media center PCs – sometimes with the noise implications that comes with a high-end system cooling. These days are over. An integrated GPU can now handle hardware decoding from end-to-end with little CPU usage. The decoding quality is impeccable and I think that most recent tests show that this GPU gets the highest score in video-quality benchmarks.
Blu-Ray decode uses less than 20% of the CPU
This is the configuration that we used for this test
A smaller, more silent system
Small PC cases are designed creatively to improve cooling
The one thing that you should avoid when building a home theater PC (HTPC) is the little motherboard fan (40-50mm) that spins as fast as 4000rpm. They make a really annoying sound and can be found on many motherboard chipsets or graphics cards. The thermal dissipation of the GeForce 9400M allows it to be passively cooled by a heatsink (in a desktop case). The, you will have to get a big CPU fan and power supply fan (120+mm). From there, it should be nearly silent.
Our test system had a 3.0Ghz Intel Dual-Core CPU in it, but I’m sure that you can use a 2.4Ghz CPU without any problems. This could make it even easier to cool. I don’t think that there is an AMD version of this chipset at the moment.
Beyond Home Theater PC
Decoding videos is great, but even new Centrino laptops can do it, although. May be not with the same level of quality. However, the GeForce 9400M is also powerful to handle decent 3D graphics. We’re not talking about top-notch high-end gaming, but playing recent games at 720p resolution with reduced details (shadows, particles…) is now possible – which is no small feat for integrated graphics chip. And while you might not play Crysis on your HTPC, you might want to enjoy Google Earth or other applications like it.
There’s also the potential for video or music *encoding*. Yes, we are talking about real-time (or faster) content compression. Right now, software like Badaboom is still new and somewhat limited (in formats, outputs) but it is improving on a regular basis – a new version was released days ago. Right now, it takes only minutes to encode a movie to a portable format (iPod).
Software Integration is not optimum, yet
The downside of new hardware is usually that software is playing catch-up. In this instance, I’m thinking of the operating system: Windows Vista or Mac OS X are still not taking advantage of the 9400M’s full potential. Mac OS does not have an encoding solution (it might be in Snow Leopard) while Vista does not take full advantage of the 9400M video processor (VP) natively in Windows Media Player, even if it partially uses hardware acceleration. Vista does not support Blu-Ray out of the box too.
To use 100% of the chip’s processing power, you need to run Cyberlink for video-playback and Badaboom for encoding. I’m pretty sure that Windows 7 will be a step towards using GPUs more, but that’s a bit remote.
For an HTPC owner, it means that the integration to Media Center (or whatever interface you are using) is not as good as it could be. This is not a killer, but having a tight integration is paramount for a consumer product.
Conclusion
When nForce came out, some customers (motherboard makers) were reluctant to build a product with an integrated GPU. Years later, the integrated GPU makes a triumphant return, mainly because it grew out of 3D gaming into other fields like video, photos and potentially much more, thanks to GPU computing. I’m still running my 3yr old Media Center PC and it’s really hard to decide if I should jump now or wait for the next cool thing from NVIDIA… stay tuned!
*With a 3.0Ghz Intel Core Duo CPU
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